May 10, 2014

In the midst of a biographical interview, Steven Pinker calls up a quote I've never heard before:

When I got to Harvard, the Psychology Department, at least the experimental program in the Psychology Department, was extremely mathematical. It specialized in a sub-sub-discipline called psychophysics, which was the oldest part of psychology, coming out of Germany in the late 19th century. William James, the namesake of this building, said “the study of psychophysics proves that it is impossible to bore a German.”

It's oddly similar to the complaint of an alcoholic singer in a Garrison Keillor short story about how Norwegians will not allow themselves to be entertained.

My German wife of 35 years is still the funniest person I know,but not IN German,only in English.And then,unfortunately,not intentionally.Her English is fluent but she can still mangle the language sufficiently to crack me up.

On these occasions,she often demonstrates the German love of slapstick humour by hitting me over the head with a blunt object.

If you talk with a waiter in Europe chances are they will tell you that German tourists, particularly when traveling in groups, are the loudest. They are also well liked because they spend more money compared to a lot of other travelers.

It's similar to a joke by George Santayana, James's acquaintance and fellow Harvard man. While in Germany Santayana observed that the Germans, like other purer races, "seemed to pay for the distinctness of the type which they preserve by missing some of the ordinary attributes of humanity." He goes on to say "the Germans, as far as I know, have no capacity for being bored. Else I think the race would have become extinct long ego through self-torture." Think of the Ring cycle, Hegel, Goethe's Faust, doorstop pedantic scholarship, etc.

The jokes are basically the same, so I suspect James and Santayana were adapting a joke in general circulation among the educated men of New England.

William James might also have had in mind Die Meistersinger, which is still going strong at the 5-hour mark. Too bad James missed the documentary film The Clock (2010), made by an almost German (Swiss), which ticks away non-stop for 24 hours.

I was a fan of an obscure game-creation program and played some of the RPGs created by the community. There were two prominent entries from Germans--among the best-made games in the field, BTW, taking into account these were all one-person creations.

Anyway, one was totally loose and silly, the other a nicely imagined fantasy world. The thing they both had in common was copious amounts of potty humor. n=2, but still.

Apparently it just boils down to joking about poop instead of sex--saying 'shit' instead of 'fuck', to wit.

Not true about Norwegians: they entertain themselves just fine with 18-hour-long "slow TV" programs that show people knitting, chopping wood, drying wood, stacking wood, and a log burning in a fireplace, all shown in their entirety, without any time compression.

THe Economist's article on that rice growing in China research indicates that Westerners have been shown to have a more analytic and abstract mental life than Chinese. Anecdotally this agrees with what I know about the two races. Perhaps this is also the cause of East asia being not very productive on the pop culture front?

Sure, Steve makes the obvious points on how Germans are incapable of being bored and how israels can't be embarassed. What I'm curious about is whether Germans can be embarassed and Israelis be bored..

"Oh come on. Has nobody seen Berndt das Brot? They like a lot of the silly things we do, though obviously there are cultural differences and things get lots in translation."

There are tons of Germans on the Anglophone internet (probably the second largest European group you see on English media sites after Scandinavians of whatever stripe) and to a man they're pretty ordinary people.

"Perhaps this is also the cause of East asia being not very productive on the pop culture front?"

Um...anime? manga? They may not have wide appeal, but the Japanese have never lacked for visual culture. I think the Asian intelligence is more visuospatial than ours, and so they come up with gorgeous paintings, well-designed cars, and some of the most impressive costumes I've seen...

There's a Japanese boarding school near where I live for rich Japanese kids who want to spend a year abroad in America but want to spend it with other Japanese kids. You can recognize them walking down Ventura Blvd. because they are so much more elaborately dressed than anybody who grew up here. The level of creativity in clothes among the Japanese teens dwarfs that of American students of similar levels of wealth.

I suspect it has only been like this for the last 20 or 30 years but the young Japanese women are now definitely into dressing up more than anybody in Southern California. Lower Manhattan/Brooklyn might compare, but nowhere else I'm familiar with in America.

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